Jaclyn Mednicov

BIO
I’m a Chicago-based artist and educator working in painting, printmaking, ceramics, and installation. I received my MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016), MA in Studio Arts from Eastern Illinois Uni...

BIO
I’m a Chicago-based artist and educator working in painting, printmaking, ceramics, and installation. I received my MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016), MA in Studio Arts from Eastern Illinois University (2012), and BFA from the University of Kansas (1999). I’ve been invited as an artist in residence to the European Ceramic Work Centre (the Netherlands), SEA Foundation (the Netherlands), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson City), and Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest). My most recent solo show, Beneath the Green, closed at Goldfinch (Chicago) this February. Previous select solo and two-person exhibitions include Paris London Hong Kong (Chicago), The SEA Foundation (NL), and Tarble Arts Center (Charleston). Select group exhibitions include Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), DOCUMENT (Chicago), ADDS DONNA (Chicago), Northern Illinois University Art Museum (Dekalb), Morlan Gallery (Lexington), and The Franklin (Chicago). I’ve been awarded an NEA funded Artist Grant, a 3Arts Make a Wave Grant, a Netherland-America Foundation Cultural Grant, among others. My work has been featured in New American Paintings, Printmaking Today, LUXE Interiors, and Sheridan Road. I’m currently a Lecturer at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Painting and Drawing Department.     ARTIST STATEMENT At 17, I first understood painting as an important means of expression. As a reserved teenager I experienced liberating senses of freedom and comfort while exploring form, texture, and the material basis of artistic practice. With increasing conviction, I felt that only through art could I ‘see’ and only through artworks did I have something to say.   I’m a multidisciplinary artist who incorporates elements from the environment into works testing the bounds of beauty. I gather weeds and flora. And I press these botanicals at various stages of degradation into clay, a medium that narrows and arrests time and simultaneously reveals a universe of detail – the clay negative serves as a mold to cast into. Final ceramic forms are vessels, cylinders, and fragments, and, in acrylic, relief paintings. These works are metaphors. Major life events, especially the loss of my father, have highlighted for me the fragility of life and the ephemerality of existence.